Cisco recently announced the finalists in its "Think Inside the Box" Developer Contest. The contest is intended to "promote the concept of the network as a platform" and it's based on the capabilities of the Cisco Integrated Services Router Application Extension Platform (AXP), which is essentially a Linux blade that plugs into the Cisco Integrated Services Router. Teams from all over the world entered the contest, and seemed to really run with the idea of offloading tasks to the network hardware. Read on for our interview with one of the contest's finalists.

i like this idea. i had no clue it was going on until now. i will look into it and check out the contest and everything. thanks for this article.

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i can see where everything may be going. i believe this would make networks more secure as in they wont have to rely on outside platforms. i imagine this "inside the box' as a blanket platform. wont be long before a standard sits and other build upon it. Cisco ftw.